Barcelona and its neighbourhoods

The setting is the stuff of dreams. Curled between the last lurch of the Pyrenees and the palm-rimmed Mediterranean, Barcelona was born with the power to seduce: to her poets she was always ‘the Great Enchantress’.

But this is no languid beauty: Barcelona goes about its business and its pleasure with such ballistic intensity that it is sometimes hard to tell if it’s insanely serious or seriously insane. The city it resembles most is New York, with its gung-ho capitalism, its mania for design and fashion, its numerous art galleries and theatres, and its love of strutting its stuff. Barcelona has the restless ‘can-do’ spirit of the New World – grandiose projects and utopian schemes run through its very woof and warp.

It is a city of strong will, a work of art, and, like Paris, the shopfront of a nation. Only this nation isn’t Spain: Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, a long-submerged nation which now takes the palm as Spain’s wealthiest autonomous region.